Cleveland school district celebrates rise in state ratings

View full sizeScott Shaw, The Plain DealerSara Nwakanmat, who is in a pre-kindergarten class, works with teacher Sara Burdette at the Douglas MacArthur Girls Leadership Academy in Cleveland.

Cleveland school officials celebrated gains in academic performance Friday, their enthusiasm tempered by the knowledgethat it's still a long uphill climb.

As expected, release of the district's state 2009-10 report card showed the schools scored "continuous improvement," which is the equivalent of a C and an increase of one notch from the district's previous mark, "academic watch."

Among the so-called "Ohio 8" urban school systems, Cincinnati became the first to be designated as "effective," a B. Akron, Canton, Columbus and Toledo are in continuous improvement and Dayton is in academic watch. Youngstown is the only school system in the state in "academic emergency," an F.

Cleveland got its boost mainly for achieving "value-added" status a second straight year. Value-added measures whether students in the fourth through eighth grades learned more or less than expected over the year in reading and mathematics.

Overall, students met only two of 26 benchmarks, called indicators, for test scores, attendance and graduation rate. Both successes were in the 11th grade, where more than the required 85 percent passed reading and writing exams.

But Chief Executive Officer Eugene Sanders and others took heart in progress, sometimes substantial, sometimes just a blip. Highlights include:

â¢Students performed better than the previous year on 18 of 24 tests and nudged up their attendance and graduation rates. The graduation rate, based on the 2008-09 school year, increased less than a point and remained at just under 55 percent.

â¢Reading and test scores stayed well below state standards but rose across the grade spectrum. The ratio of students achieving proficiency in reading in the seventh and eighth grades climbed by double-digit percentages.

â¢The schools met 15 of 22 "subgroup indicators"for "adequate yearly progress," more than double the level of the previous year. Subgroups include students who are poor, disabled or of different races. If one subgroup fails to make adequate progress, the district as a whole fails to achieve it.

â¢Cleveland's "performance index" rose 2.5 points to 74.3 out of possible 120. The performance index is a summary of all test scores.

â¢Twenty-seven city schools raised their ratings by at least one level or maintained a top score of excellent. The proportion of schools in academic watch or emergency fell from 72 percent to 63 percent.

At a news conference Friday, school board Chairwoman Denise Link called the report card a "good first step." She said it laid the foundation for academic "transformation," a sweeping set of reforms the district launched Thursday.

Sanders noted that the district made gains in a year when the staff was distracted by school closings and tough union negotiations.

"Imagine what we can do when we're really focused," he said.

The district climbed from academic watch to continuous improvement in the 2006-07 school year, Sanders' first as CEO, then slipped back again. Achieving value-added is the district's best bet for avoiding a repeat.

"To do that, we would have to continue to grow kids at an accelerated pace," Chief Academic Officer Eric Gordon said in an interview before the news conference. "We've proved we can do it for two years in a row; now we've got to prove we can do it for three."

The celebration was held on the front lawn of Whitney Young, which becomes the first Cleveland school to receive the highest possible designation, "excellentwith distinction," an A+. The Harvard Avenue school for gifted and talented students hadsixth through 12th grades last year; it has added second through fifth.

The school, which has about 450 students this year, enjoys advantages: It is small, considering the number of grades, and students are admitted on the basis of grades and test scores. But Principal Karen Byron-Johnson said "hands-on, personal attention" helped the school reach the top.

"I have teachers who were determined to know who was sitting in those chairs in front of them," she said in an interview.

Eight other Cleveland schools achieved a rating of excellent and the same number were designated as effective.

All the district's so-called "innovation schools" scored continuous improvement or higher. The new MC STEM High School, which holds classes at the Great Lakes Science Center and GE's Nela Park campus in East Cleveland, was rated for the first time, receiving a mark of effective.

Some new names elbowed their way into the upper echelon. Three elementary schools -- Benjamin Franklin, William C. Bryant and Tremont Montessori -- vaulted from continuous improvement to excellent.

Two district-sponsored charter schools also fared well. Citizens' Academy, for kindergarten through fifth grade, was rated excellent, and Entrepreneurship Preparatory, a middle school, was designated as effective.

Ratings were mostly poor for 16 schools that the district closed or merged in June. The two high schools on the list -- East and South -- went out in academic emergency.

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